When Penny Fletcher recalls how her boys became Olympic skiers with a bond deeper and stronger than one formed by mere sibling love and rivalry, she relives the poignant times when Taylor was a baby and Bryan was undergoing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Bryan was diagnosed in May 1990, a month shy of his fourth birthday. Taylor was born 11 days after Bryan's diagnosis.

At the Sochi Olympics the brothers from Steamboat Springs will compete as world-class endurance athletes in nordic combined, a dual event involving ski jumping and cross country skiing. But the most beautiful images of the brotherly love between these men, now 27 and 23, come from memories when Bryan was at his weakest and most vulnerable.

"When Taylor was a baby, and Bryan was going through his chemo, it was a troublesome time for us," Penny said. "The times that Bryan felt terrible, the first thing he would do is ask me to bring his little brother in to him so he could hold him. He would lay in that bed, he would hold his little brother, and he would tell his little brother he was going to teach him how to ski."

Taylor may have been too young at the time to recall those moments now, but he has heard the story plenty of times.

"It almost brings tears to my eyes, that he was so sick and he wanted to help me, he wanted to bring me along and show me what he was doing," Taylor said. "And that's exactly what he did."

Nordic combined is an obscure sport in the U.S. because only three American towns have world-class ski jumps, but Steamboat is one of them and the sport is hallowed there. Three of the four U.S. men going to Sochi in nordic combined are from Steamboat — the Fletchers and Todd Lodwick, who will become America's first six-time winter Olympian.

Bryan Fletcher flies high and far during the ski jumping portion of the nordic combined, in which he will compete in Sochi. (Stanko Gruden, Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

Lodwick was already an international star, a World Cup winner and hometown hero when the Fletchers were kids. World Cup events brought the world's best nordic combined skiers to their club's training facility at historic Howelsen Hill. The Fletchers watched jumpers fly farther than a football field on fat skis 8 feet long, then don skinny skis to race cross country with laps looping through the town's rodeo arena.

"All their drawings in school were about how they were going to be Olympic ski jumpers," Penny said.

The Fletchers were hooked, with Bryan leading the way.

"He would take me down to Howelsen, I'd watch him ski and I would try to follow him around, chase him around," Taylor said. "It was something that I truly enjoyed."

Seven years of chemotherapy

But sometimes Bryan couldn't ski. He was in chemotherapy for seven years, much of it requiring weekly trips to Children's Hospital Colorado in Denver, and sometimes it left him too weak to train. Yet skiing got him through the low points caused by the chemo.

"The chemotherapy drugs became his motivation to be stronger, as far as what he was doing with his sports, and the ski jumping was his release emotionally from what he was going through," Penny said. "There were times when he didn't feel well enough to walk across the room. There were times when he was in bed and his immunity level was so low from the chemo that he couldn't go out there and do it, he didn't have enough hemoglobin to be able to breathe. But when he got on his skis, just remembering how crappy he felt was motivation to continue on. The pain he felt cross country skiing was nothing like the pain he felt from being laid up because he was too wiped out from chemotherapy drugs."

Doctors said Bryan should avoid exercise, but Penny would have none of that. She recalls telling those doctors: "I'm going to let him go up there on those ski jumping hills, and I'm going to let him jump, because I don't know if I'm going to have him anymore. My son wants to do this, and I can't say no to him. If he wants to ski, if he wants to ride his bike, if he wants to climb a rock, he's going to do that. I'm not going to tell him no."

Penny knew skiing helped Bryan fight back. The faster he could recover from a chemo dose, the faster he could get back to Howelsen Hill.

"It was like, 'This is what I've got to do to get back to being a normal kid,' " Bryan said. "It was an escape, a distraction, a motivation even, to keep fighting and to fight harder and faster. If I got done early, sweet, I got to go back home and get an extra day of skiing in. If it took a little longer, missing that skiing made me want it even more."

The chemo treatments ended when Bryan was 11. Finally he could turn his attention from beating leukemia to pursuing his Olympic dreams. Bryan made the U.S. Ski Team in 2006, Taylor in 2009. But in the qualification process for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Taylor beat out Bryan and got to compete in Vancouver, where the team would make U.S. nordic combined history by winning four medals.

"Oh, man, do you want to talk about a mother's heart breaking?" Penny said. "There had been no question in my mind that Bryan Fletcher would be on that Olympic team, and when he didn't make it, it was devastating. I cried. I was crying because I was happy for one but I was so sad for the other, and my heart didn't quite know how to work this."

It was hard for Taylor too.

"Not only was Bryan not going, but it was between him and me," Taylor said. "If it was between him and another person, or me and another person, that would have made the situation a lot easier."

Celebrating his brother's success

Bryan went to Vancouver, where he found another way to make the family proud.

"Bryan was a champion," Penny said. "Bryan celebrated his brother's success. He was at every single one of those events with a smile on his face and pride in his heart. I cannot tell you what an amazing man that person is, but he is. He is an amazing man."

In January 2013, the brothers captured a World Cup podium with Lodwick and Bill Demong in a team event at Schonach, Germany, finishing third. A month later, the foursome won a bronze medal at the world championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy. A month after that, Bryan picked up his first World Cup win in Oslo, the cradle of the sport.

Bryan said when they compete, they feel like they have two chances of success.

"If it's not me, it might be Taylor that day. It's nice for us to be able to pull off each other, and if one of us does well, then it's something we can both be excited and happy about. If we both have a bad day, it's like, 'So be it, we'll be here tomorrow and it's not the end of the world.' We're both good at reminding each other of that."

Having lived through Bryan's cancer, Penny doesn't have to be reminded there are worse things than losing a race. Or being left off an Olympic team. She was so upset the morning after Bryan told her that he wouldn't be on the Vancouver team, she scraped a side-view mirror off her car backing out of the garage.

"I taped it and left it like that for the longest time, to remind myself that things break and it's not the end of the world," she said.

Nordic combined is a dual event involving ski jumping and cross country skiing. Results from the jump portion determine the handicapped start of the cross country race, the longest jumper starting first with a head start determined by his margin over the next jumper, and so on.

U.S. Olympic team

The U.S. nordic combined team made history at the Vancouver Olympics four years ago, winning the country's first Olympic medal — and three more. Bill Demong won gold, Johnny Spillane of Steamboat Springs took two silvers and the U.S. claimed another silver in the team event.

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